As communications technologies develop, the Internet of Things has been widely used in multiple fields such as smart grid, intelligent transportation, government affairs, and smart household. Currently, low-cost machine type communications user equipment (Machine Type Communications User Equipment, MTC UE) has been introduced to a Long Term Evolution (Long Term Evolution, LTE) network, with a view to enhancing or optimizing the LTE network and an air interface for the MTC UE. An important application of the MTC UE is a smart meter, which, for example, can be used to automatically read metering information such as water, electricity, and gas, and report the metering information to a data center. However, such a smart meter is generally installed in a basement of a house, or is isolated by a heavy metal housing. Therefore, in this case, a path loss between the MTC UE and an evolved NodeB (Evolved Node B, eNodeB) is more severe than a path loss between a common UE and the eNodeB. To ensure that the MTC UE can still normally communicate with the eNodeB when the path loss between the MTC UE and the eNodeB is severe, an operator proposes enhancing coverage by 20 dB compared with an existing LTE network when an LTE network is providing a service for the MTC UE.
In the existing LTE network, for a UE in an idle state, when the UE has an incoming service, or for a UE in an idle state or a connected state, when a system message needs to be changed or an earthquake or tsunami early warning or commercial mobile alert service is required, the network needs to page a corresponding UE. A paging process is usually as follows: A mobility management entity (Mobile Management Entity, MME) that serves a UE sends a paging message to all eNodeBs in a tracking area; when receiving the paging message sent by the MME, an eNodeB delivers the paging message to a UE in a management range of the eNodeB.
During implementation of the foregoing paging process, if the existing LTE system is used to provide a service for a UE that has a relatively severe path loss with an eNodeB, for example, an MTC UE, coverage of the existing LTE system needs to be enhanced. In this case, a paging message with enhanced coverage needs to be sent to the UE. If the UE is being paged still in an existing paging manner, the UE cannot normally receive a paging message of the system, which causes a paging failure.